Israel wouldn’t have earned its reputation as the Startup Nation if some of the thousands of companies that have come out of this small country hadn’t earned big bucks for their investors.

How big? Jerusalem-based Mobileye holds the title for the most lucrative acquisition of an Israeli company: $15.3 billion – that’s how much Intel paid to acquire the company in 2017.

That record seemed to be on the verge of being broken this week by the much-talked-about acquisition of the four-year-old Israeli cloud security startup Wiz.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google parent company Alphabet was in advanced talks to acquire Wiz for $23 billion, making it the largest buyout in both Israel and Google’s respective histories.

In the end, the deal fell through at the last possible moment after a shock announcement from CEO Assaf Rappaport that the company was rejecting “offers we have received”.

While it’s still early days, and no-one knows exactly what might come next for cyber company Wiz – an IPO perhaps, or maybe even a bigger buy-out offer – the news certainly focused worldwide attention once more on Israel’s lively high-tech sector, which despite experiencing a slump related to the war in Gaza, and the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, is still developing at a fast pace.

While we don’t know what the rest of 2024 will bring, ISRAEL21c compiled a list of the 15 largest startup acquisitions in Israeli history below. Plus, as a bonus, the acquisition that put the Startup Nation on the map in the first place.

Keep reading at israel21c.org.

M-Systems Co-founder Dov Moran, Imperva Co-founder and former CTO Amichai Shulman, Orbotech former CTO Dr. Abraham Gross, Mercury Interactive Founder Amnon Landan, and Mobileye Executive VP of R&D Gaby Hayon are all Technion alumni. Mazor Robotics was founded by Technion Professor Emeritus Moshe Shoham.